First Tongue

The First Tongue is the language spoken by the Uratha, who gain an innate basic understanding of it upon their First Change. It is also spoken by spirits, and may also have been the first human language.

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The root of most First Tongue stuff is Sumerian, then run back through Grimm's Law. Step Three is where it gets really complicated, though, as many — and I mean many — a word is not at all literally the un-Grimmed Sumerian root. Messing around in WTF: Blasphemies I had to come up with some weird poetic language — like "neighbor-desire" for Envy. Many of the words that you see in the core were assembled by the guy who first put this thing together (James Kiley) and then many more were done by Carl Bowen while I was working on other stuff. So I can't quote the exact etymology of some words. Hieing all the way back to that traffic light spirit, the Little Road Tyrant — yeah, its First Tongue name was derived from the Sumerian "red-yellow-green."

There are minor "rules" derived elsewhere, too. Like the lunar choirs — they all end in "-lunim" not because it's proper Sumerian derivation, but because it was evocative of old angel names (and thereby sort of evoked another really ancient culture).

Sometimes we went right for the in-joke, too. The Breath, Worm and Deep all have direct in-joke First Tongue names, two of them from W:tA (the Breath from an Elemental Urge, and the Worm... well, you probably know why we went with "Zmai").

In retrospect, I guess it wasn't a fair challenge. Rule Three is in its way the most important rule, and it seems to have gotten in the way of decoding the most. I apologize for that.

But it is the most important rule, particularly when designing your own words. It's very, very easy to come up with the same not-so-intuitive word for three entirely different concepts, due to the many homonyms in Sumerian. Always keep that sucker in mind.